A History of Sanskrit Literature c21.s5.19

c21.s5.19

‘The king on the battlefield drew to himself the life (string) of his bow; yet the enemy perished. In the host of the foe suppliants received a lakh of gold (the king’s arrows found their mark), yet the glory (due to them for generosity) was won by him. Thinking he had abandoned the earth, the foe swiftly occupied it with their heads (the king losing patience, the foe was swiftly laid low with head on earth in death). The hostile host five times sought battle (met with death); the king needed no higher number (as all were disposed of).' Still, while this commingling of the pun, Çleṣa, and apparent incongruity, Virodha or Virodhābhāsa, is ingenious, it is clearly fatiguing when kept up. Still more irritating is the further development in the figure of exhaustive statement, Parisaṁkhyā, when it is intended to express by words not only their literal sense but a denial of what might be the sense if a pun were intended; thus in *netrotpāṭanam munīnām* we are to see the sense 'there was plucking out of roots in the case of wormwood trees only (for ascetics do not pluck out their eyes).' Sound effects are sometimes ingenious, as in the following Yamaka describing the wind: *āndolitakusumakesare keçareṇumuṣi raṇitamadhuramaṇīnāṁ ramaṇīnāṁ vikacakamudākare mudākare*, 'rocking the filaments of the flowers, stealing the pollen from the hair of fair damsels with sweet chiming jewels, expanding many a lotus, and causing delight.' But alliteration, Anuprāsa, can be merely tedious, as in the description of the Revā as: *madakalakalahaṁsasārasarāsitodbhrāntabhāṣkūṭavikaṭapucchacchāṭāvyādhūtavikacakamalakhaṇḍavigalitamakarandabindusandohasurabhitasalilayā*, 'whose waters were fragrant by the many drops of juice fallen from the fragments of full-blown lotuses shaken by many a monstrous tail of fish scared by the notes, indistinct through passion, of the geese and herons.' It is clear that this is an utter abuse of language.¹ The work would indeed be unreadable, were it not for the care taken by the author to vary his long compounds by occasional short words in order to permit the reader to breathe and gain some comprehension of what has gone before, and notably in occasional short dialogue passages, as when he describes the talk of lovers at night, he realizes the necessity of the use of short sentences. But if his tale is of the genus Kathā, he does his best by length of compounds to establish the falsity of the suggestion of Ānandavardhana² that the compounds of Ākhyāyikās can be longer than those of the Kathā.